Mission

In collaboration with University of Ljubljana and research institutes, a Slovenia company Harpha Sea from Koper has developed a robotic vessel for hydrographic and bio-chemical measurements. The vessel can guided either manually guided or by autonomously following a pre-defined path using an onboard GPS system. However, simply following a pre-defined path in a highly dynamic environment such as coastal belt is not acceptable, as it does not take into account unpredictable obstacles like other vessels, swimmers and animals. A vessel should not present hazard to living beings and should not interfere with the regular marine transport.

The “Roboat2014 – A student project” is one of the projects funded by Slovenian initiative “Creative approach to practical knowledge”. The students have been developing several computer vision algorithms for enabling autonomous navigation in a USV built by Harpha Sea Koper, while working as a team, distributing administration work, jointly writing reports, presentations and papers. This gave the students an opportunity to gain practical engineering skills as well as team-work competences.

Project team

• iz. prof. Matej Kristan (PI)
• doc. dr. Janez Perš (PI)
• Duško Vranac (technical mentor)

Students

• Aleksandar Dimitriev (FRI)
• Franc Oven (FRI)
• Tina Strgar (FRI)
• Aleš Černe (FE)
• Jošt Novak (FE)

Results

Here is a promo video created by the students to demonstrate their results.

Financer

Projekt delno financira Evropska unija, in sicer iz Evropskega socialnega sklada. Projekt se izvaja v okviru Operativnega programa razvoja človeških virov za obdobje 2007-2013, 1. razvojne prioritete “Spodbujanje podjetništva in prilagodljivosti ter prednostne usmeritve” 1.3. “Štipendijske sheme”, v okviru potrjene operacije “Po kreativni poti do praktičnega znanja”.